


chiaroscuro

by NerumiH



Category: Vocaloid
Genre: Gen, Hitoshizuku x yama, Sychronicity, outdated i know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 06:28:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5118581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NerumiH/pseuds/NerumiH
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Before you have even dragged your sister's wasted body out of the caverns, another baby will be snatched, screaming, from another crib. What is it that you hope to accomplish?"</p><p>– Synchronicity. Len & Miku, trapped in the chamber before his sister, where freedom waits on a deal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	chiaroscuro

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I've wanted to write something for Synchronicity Miku for what is literally ages...With my new hito obsession I decided to give it a shot this time around. It always kind of bugged me that Miku was so easy to get through, and she fascinated me, so...here we are.
> 
> Disclaimer that this is entirely interpretation from the PV's, no extra-canon content!
> 
> Enjoy. Reviews are cool even if you hated it. I have some other hitoshizuku stuff if you liked this but I mean don’t tell anyone that I’m self-promoing

.

i

.

Over it all, he hears her.

A heavy veil of fog rests on his head, burying him under his own unconsciousness; the impenetrable stone pushes cold up beneath him. Everything he wears,  _is_ , feels so much heavier, but not as if it matters more than it did. Not as if anything matters. Pain and fear runs thick through his veins. Sticks, rots in his head.

And he can still hear her.

Her voice. Small, lithe but powerful...closer. Closer. She danced in his head before but now she feels like she is really within him. Impassioned. Like she is slipping into the dull, cozy place of his heart. When entering the caves, he had heard her, too – made everyone freeze and drink her in, the ebullient, the ephemeral, the real. The finally real.

It felt like hell to wake up, but her sweetness coaxes him to close his eyes again. Rest, wait. The warm metal of his necklace floats into his limp palm. She's so close – how can he wait  _now_?

Len summons everything in himself to drag his body up. Black splashes into his vision and she glimmers beautifully there; he's yanked under the murkiness. His head cracks against stone. He couldn't have managed to pull himself up more than arm's length from the ground, but it feels as if he's dropped from a cliff.

Under her hymn, he feels footsteps.

And a voice chimes through the blue-tinted darkness, "I can  _hear_  you, brave, heroic boy… You will never take her from me."

.

_. chiaroscuro ._

_the veil of contrast between the light and the dark_

.

ii

.

The priestess. The guardian. The goddess of the beast. No one dared speak of her in their journey – perhaps they didn't know about her, or feared that her presence would deter him.

A dragon would be a barrier to break down, bloody and burnt and carving out screams.

A  _woman_  would be a true fright.

She's enormous. She towers over him, once unfrightening in his blind rage, but now, his pain and loss allows him the clarity of how she is built of shadows, hardness. Lying on his side, he watches her stroll through the room to him – her gait is regal. She keeps her staff a few inches from the floor, gripped in a deceptively slack hold. Beneath her fringe, half of her face is bathed in black ichor.

"He awakens," she says. Her voice is elegant and calm, of a laughable hauteur if she wasn't, finally, sinking into his skin with poisonous terror. He tightens his grip on his pendant – it feels as if the protective gesture saps all the energy he has into the metal.

He croaks, "I just want to find my sister."

He needs her to keep singing for now. To keep fighting on, the way she has for nineteen long, painful, lonely years.

_I'll find you._

The guardian smiles. "If only all the Divas before were lucky enough to have brothers."

.

iii

.

He's peripherally aware of blood pooling under his head. He can feel it drying in his mouth, metallic and thick behind his teeth. The guardian stands next to him, in the direction his useless body is turned. He can't look up at her face with her so close, but her skirt waves like storm clouds rolling in; even the twitch of her hair around her calves is languid.

She places the staff near his face. He flinches back from it – it shoots tired pain through the back of his neck.

He hisses, "Just let me pass."

"Oh, darling." He can hear the hard lilt of her smirk. "You need to do more than beg and tromp around in the blood of your companions. I need to give you permission. And besides…" Her hair ripples as she slowly turns her head down to him. "You don't sound as if you're capable of managing any more than your mouth."

The staff steps out of his vision – frigid metal touches under his jaw, and slowly, methodically, she drags the weapon along his periphery. He tries his hardest not to gulp when she touches his throat; she pushes open his shoulders to draw a shape down his chest, ignores the weight of his coat for favour of his stomach. He lays stiff as she draws an image of him for herself, or is  _testing_  him, giving decisive nudges into his knees, crotch, shoulder blades. She halts at his crown.

"Familiar," she breathes. Her skirt flares to the ground as she bends, and he thinks of the weight and dark fluidity of the dragon, murmuring roiling noise so close, so far. Her hand opens towards his face.

At the first brush of her thumb against his mouth, Len whips his head away – she ensnares his face in her claws and slams him back to the stone. His mind swings aimlessly for a second. He chokes out the blood that has backed up his throat, but it feels like nothing compared to his frustration. He is in no state to fight a witch. A flicker of fear worms into his gut – he is in no state to save  _her_.

The guardian runs her fingers languorously over his face. She leaves a wintry ghost across his features; he hopes she can  _feel_ , at least, the sturdy, threatening hate he's painted into his face while she examines the shape of his brow and plucks at his lips. She is close enough now, that he can look at her too. Her hair drapes away from her face, revealing that marble, chiselled mask underneath, sinking like craters into her eye sockets.

She rests her palm against his cheek.

"Very familiar. You look like her."

.

iv

.

"So you've come to save her."

She is strolling up and down the chamber. A heavy door arches behind her – he's long assessed that it must be locked with magic. He will have to make use of the priestess. Her skirt swings heavy behind her like the tail of a heavy beast. She doesn't look over at him, but he's learned, by now, that she hears everything, no matter how small the whisper.  _She_  must be so loud to her, then. Her singing is fading to him, the way it did when he was above land, ages away from her, and she rarely came other than in dream or sickness.

He's pulled himself up against the wall, though exhaustion still presses on him. His head is bleeding badly. Thickening his hair, pooling in his ear. He fights his sister's thrall to keep his eyes open – for once he is resisting her, and it sickens him.

The guardian enunciates, "You know, of course, why your sister was chosen."

"Rin," he says tersely. "Her name is Rin."

The guardian stops walking. The gesture is so slow it's as if she's wading into thicker and thicker water. "Rin… Is that so? She doesn't remember it."

That grips hard around his heart.

She smiles. "I suppose, if she's never been called by it, it isn't really hers." Unaffected by the glare that slashes Len's face, her pacing resumes, calculated. She says, "Before your sister, there was a Diva, and before her, there was another, a lineage stretching beautiful and bloody into antiquity. Female after female, drawn from their cribs to the caverns, where they are raised under my hand and under her resting, fiery shadow."

"I know this story," he snaps, tasting bitterness.

"Ah." The guardian folds her hands daintily on the handle of her staff. "So you are as heartless as I assumed."

He grits his teeth although it aches. He tries to draw himself up the wall, but his legs won't support him.

She continues, "There is always a girl to replace a Diva. To be  _taught_. Understand this, boy… Before you have even dragged your sister's wasted body out of the caverns, to burn her under the harsh light, confuse her with human pettiness, drown her in your affections she cannot return… Another baby will be snatched, screaming, from another crib. Her mother will be beaten into submission if she dares defy the law. What is it that you hope to accomplish?"

"To stop it all," he growls. For the first time, her gait lightens – one foot before the other, she rocks back and forth, tilting out her feet in a ballet stance, and her bright hair tickles over her shoulder.

She laughs. Small and scathing. "Hero!" she cries to the craggy ceiling. "A hero! He wishes to rip the dragon out of her slumber to save these poor, distressed maidens. He wishes to see the mountain erupt, and the cities all burn, the innocent to perish  _screaming_ , just for the chance to sink his selfish fingers in the wanton flesh of  _sweet_   _little sister!"_

She couldn't have struck him harder if she'd driven her staff into his gaping head wound.

"He wishes to play Helios, and be her gentle sun. Let her learn about the beauty of the living, waking world without burning her. Sing for me,  _for_ _ **me**_ _,_  dear sister…while the world dies all around us."

"I don't want this – "

"Don't you?" She cackles, high and ripping through the dim air. She raises a gloved hand and blinding teal magic spins within it; he flinches as it explodes outwards, but nothing hits him. Countless women of all ages land gracefully upon the floor between them, made of inky shadow with their desperate dancing frozen in snowdrifts, dresses iced in waves and coils around their straining bodies. The guardian shrieks, "You want to stop it all, you say! Free all the Divas, past and future? And what  _then_? Who sings for the dragon then, Kagamine Len? Will it be  _me_ , this cruel bitch defending a monster?"

She slices her staff downwards and they all vanish like paint dripped into a stream – all but one, who arcs between them, her body more alive than the others. A necklace with a heavy pendant shines at her breast. A violent pain rips through his own.

She screams, "Am  _I_ supposed to sing forever for your heartless love? Who will save  ** _me!?"_**

She cuts Rin down, and his sister whispers into the air.

.

v

.

"You haven't killed me."

"Stupid boy. Of course not." She opens a hand to the empty room – the corpses and the shadows have long been cleared. He wonders where they went…those who were once, foolishly, his companions. "I am not responsible for the bloodshed here."

"We were willing to pass quietly."

She touches a hand to her chest and laughs. "You underestimated the priestess. She does not do well with silence!"

.

vi

.

Under an hour later (he thinks – no sunlight reaches here), she has returned to crouching very near him. She measures his changing strength, again, knowing he isn't apt to run off. She taps his chin up with the elaborate head of her staff, and the rings draping off of it catch light on their thin, sword-like edges. Her breath spreads, humid, icy, into his face. She inhales through her open teeth, her tongue snakelike. She is slight but her height and presence makes him think she is heavy as iron.

He asks to deter her, "Who were you?"

She smirks. The dead mask severs her face in half; her eyes may as well belong to a skull. Empty. Disturbing, but beautiful, shining like bone and marble in the cemetery moonlight. "It was so long ago. I'm afraid I cannot summon the memory for you."

She's lying. "How long?"

Her words cascade across his cracked lips. "Since the dragon-soothing began. I was the first of them all, though my death did not relieve me."

That twists his stomach. While slowly turning away his head and keeping his voice on a balance, he says, "You must age slowly, then, or perhaps my eyes deceive me as to see you so charitably."

She smirks, knowing as well as he is that he's toying with no end in mind. "I do not age. I was brought in as a young woman, and a young woman I will always remain."

She looks to be slightly older than him, though he's only drawing conclusions from her smooth, airy voice and the tantalizing petal curve of her lips, her thin nose, perfect moon-pale skin. She must have lived so little of her own life. She must  _know_  what she is starving the Divas of. Len nervously licks his lips, and she says, "As for how charitable it is that you may see me… I do not remember my own appearance."

Her hand slides down the handle of her staff, fingers snaking and wrapping gracefully around the metal. She's leaning in, the way she's done before, with flirtation and mockery in such an elegant tone. He draws back his shoulders, and breathes in the cold she spreads on his cheeks – it's a lie to say he wasn't baiting it, and will continue to do so. If he can distract her…

"Perhaps you can serve to remind me…" As she tilts her head, her hair pools over his hips and streaks like tracks of rain down her thighs. "Help me place my skin, where my curves bloom, where I can  _ache_ …"

Being so close to her is making him feel alight, in the terrifying way as if the earth is gone under him and he's going to topple down to a very real death. Apologizing profusely to his sister, he lets her slip closed the distance between them. He very, very slowly lifts his hand. If he can remove her blindness, perhaps she'll be unbound… He's too disgusted with himself to make any further move, for an instant, but she claims it for him.

She feels like snow. Frigid and tiny, glassy, sharp pieces, like she is only sewn of tiny globules of hard light. For once  _he_  feels like the shadow – she melts through him, making him urge to tremble, to be snuffed out in this very dead cavern, and never, ever have heard his sister's voice.

His pendant is still warm, pressed against his heart.

Gingerly, steadied by his old confidence that she so mocked, his thumb presses into the sharp corner of her mask. He coaxes open her mouth and it feels like stepping out into a winter night and he edges his fingers under the marble –

She rips away; the pain of her driving her spear into his throat comes cruelly delayed, but after an instant of dread he's doubled over, shuddering hands scrabbling at the displaced agony in his neck, and she brushes off the butt of her staff like he's left a stain on it. He can't even hear her – she's rendered him deaf in pain, choking on the violent bruise just under his throat, the pressure enough to rip his neck clean open, and for a second, he fears that's what she's done.

Her shrill giggle knives through his fog, "I  _do_  miss men!" She sweeps to her feet in his spinning vision. "But that won't convince me to let you through, fool."

The cape of her skirt fans out, as ebony as he felt when touching her, and something kicks him to reach out and snatch it. Yank her to the floor and holler in her face to listen – he's  _over it._  It's been hours. He can't start over with her fucking games. He cannot listen to his sister be tortured another minute, all because of a door and a soulless priestess and her brother's pathetic weakness. This is not the end of him.

He hisses from the floor, the words clawing out his throat like barbed wire, "I want her to have the life she lost."

The guardian turns, slow as haunt. He takes it as a good omen.

"I want her to have grown up with a family," he coughs out, determination fueling him through the ache, "to have been brought up smiling, laughing. I want to have taught her things, and have her teach me in return – I want to have seen her in the sun, seen her peaceful, furious, in despair, elated."

She is not facing him, but he watches her painting-still profile. He hopes she is remembering what was torn from her, and can find mercy.

"To never have known the fear of a clergy or a law. For the last thing she hears of her family to never be them screaming her name, blades at their throats. May she never yearn again. May she always have what she wishes for. May she know love."

She turns away. Her grip on her staff strengthens.

The guardian whispers like the purr of a snake,  _"I_  love her."

.

vii

.

She is forgiving enough to bring him water. He was right about the exit, however – it seems to open with powers even beyond what she harnesses in her hands, and the few minutes where he is left alone are excruciating.

He cannot hear Rin anymore.

She must have moved away – from below him, or beyond him, wherever in this labyrinth she is confined. When he has privacy he presses the pendant to his mouth, and softly murmurs to it, "I'll find you. I'm here." Yet he feels cruel and stupid and useless for still being in this chamber, blood dried like mud down half his face, the earth still swinging in wretched revenge when he stands. She has waited so long. His mother wants her daughter back in her arms, and Rin…Rin must need the warmth of her family and freedom. He's been journeying for months unending. He found it hard to sleep with her so near. He didn't tend to himself. He's paying for it at the least optimal moment – as if the guardian breaking a new hole in his boldness has let all the exhaustion, depression, and doubt funnel deep into his bones.

He isn't giving up. He isn't strong enough for a dragon right now (was he ever?), but he is strong enough to hold her. He needs to convince the priestess to let him through and to sing for enough time for him to gather Rin and run. Will she? Would she ever agree?

He isn't used to thinking like this. Up until now he's thrashed his way through the queen's defenses, shredded his smoking path on this brazen journey. Led by a destructive heart. He can't lie and say a small part of him doesn't still want to kill her. Spill frosted blood from that cruel heart.

The guardian sets a pitcher a few feet away from him, and he retrieves it with a meaningful (but hard) look in her direction. First he cups his hands into the mouth and drinks like some hapless beast, the water running cold like metal down his choked throat. Then he splashes his face, clearing it of sweat and tears and blood; it drips to the stone, tainted burgundy.

How vain is he to be doing so, while she dances to death.

The water pools on the glassy rock, eventually creating a small puddle that catches flickers of his mouth, black, and eyes, red. He feels sucked of life and hope, suddenly. It settles heavy on his shoulders, and the reflection of his eyes grow glistening, misted.

Something else flashes beyond him.

He whips around, but it is not the guardian, there to gut him from behind like a coward – a shadow, all in grey, flits weightlessly through the cavern, not a few feet away from his reaching fingers. Her face, not featureless but as delicately obscured as the fibres of rolling clouds, turns to the imitation of a sky; a silken piece of drapery floats between her wrists, and she and her dress and her flaxen hair are unearthly in their mesmerizing dance. Her pale, starlight skin. Her eyes are cornflower blue, tiredly lidded with thick lashes. She is singing – he can almost hear it from this apparition.

He stumbles to his feet. It's her. He's never seen her in his life, never when waking, but he knows – it's his sister, inches from his grasp.

Her small feet carry her in floaty pirouettes towards him; her face is always turned away and it tugs on his heart all the tighter, the closer she gets. His hand almost reaches out for the curve of her thin shoulder but she's vanished behind his back.

And he sees the blue-haired priestess, wearing a wicked, coquettish smile. There is magic bubbling from her hands.

He feels sick. "Stop it – " he hisses, "please, stop it. Just  _give_  her to me." Rin appears at his other side, her mouth crying open around a strangled tune, the waving of her scarf covering her eyes. "Stop this…"

Rin reaches to that imagined sky again, her fingers splayed – he has an urge to thread his own through them, but she has suddenly tucked her hand in a pose of reverence, prayer, against her chest, her spinning tightening. Torn from her with every step, he pleads, "Stop, stop,  _stop_  – "

He will never let her sing again. Once he has her. He'll forbid her from dancing. He'll carve a silence into her to prevent this painful throbbing in his head. At the sight of her movement, flighty and delicate and tendon-tight with power, all his dreams of her push to the surface of his skin, burning through like acid, catching in his throat, his eyelashes, and the cry severs from him: " _I'm sorry!"_

The words stab into her like a slew of daggers – Rin's hands fly to her head as she arches back, her feet stumbling under her; her song morphs into strident lament, breaking from her and dragging her down with it. He stumbles in circles to follow her – catch her – comfort her, when he's the reason she cannot endure it in the first place.

"I'm sorry I didn't come with you – I'm sorry I lived so long without you. Rin,  _Rin_ ," his fingers dig into his arms to resist the urge to snatch her, and they're shaking, and so is she; "I'm sorry I woke from my nightmares of you. I knew – I knew you needed me. And I never came for you. I never came."

Black trickles from her mouth. The pendant on her necklace torques wildly in the air, then rips free of her throat – he clutches his own as hers vanishes and leaves her all alone. She's always been all alone.

Len is distantly aware he's crying, making himself dizzy watching her. It feels as if every wound from his journey has reopened, gaping and weeping, but never as severe as her own. He will never match her in being betrayed.

The guardian cackles from where she orchestrates. Over the din in his head, he hears her call, "Do you wish for others to die in her place so you may have her?"

"I've already made it so!" he sobs, but Rin evades, almost flirtatiously, her fingers grazing like the kiss of breeze; "My company – my  _friends_ , they died instead of her. I – I don't  _care_! A hundred women more – a  _world_  more! What difference is it to me?!"

Rin stumbles to a stop. Her back is to him, and she bends over like she is weakened. The shadow melts into the starving cuts of her shoulder blades, the shine of her silken hair. The thin chain of her necklace drapes behind her neck. He will never know what she  _was_  – but the Rin of now is so near. His urgency to see her smile is almost painful.

He moves to wrap his arms around her but she slips from the air as quickly as waking from a dream.

He whispers to the emptiness, "Let anyone die but us."

.

viii

.

"I do love her," the guardian says. She stands behind him, tall and statuesque. The sharp edges of her staff swallow light from unseen sources and spill it upon the glassy floor.

He is at the door, losing patience and energy slamming against it. There is no seam to wedge his fingers in, no hinge to cut apart. He knows Rin is beyond this – the real Rin. He can feel her pressing, desperate silence.

He ignores the guardian. She's driving him crazy in this space. He's being haunted, and she makes him want to leave his mind behind after just a few hours. But she repeats, "I do love her. Your sister. I raised her in place of her mother and her brother."

He clenches a fist at his side. "Yes, raised her for this prisoner's life. How noble of you."

"I raised her not to yearn, tear, or fret. I raised her not to fear me. To keep singing for me."

Alarmed, he snaps his glare onto her. She is pleasantly regarding a distant wall, standing at profile to him again, fingers idly slipping up and down the staff's hilt.

She breathes, "She does know love, boy."

Her head turns, mechanically slow, towards him. The pits of her eye sockets in the mask stare hard into him. The corners of her mouth flicker up the barest fraction. "She knows your love."

It's as if she's punched a hand through his ribs and squeezed.

"Against my teachings, you alone have remained with her. Not the sky, the sea, the clean air of the land above. Only you. So much so," her gloved hand eases to the black chain around his neck. She feeds the ebony pendant into her palm, holding it gently like it is something weak and barely living, "that I could never take this trinket away from her."

He slides his hand into hers, taking it back.

The guardian's smile waxes a little brighter. "She mourns this love. She always has, but she  _does_  believe that it is near a resurrection."

He murmurs, "You would deny her the relief?"

"I would not wish the pain on another who knows no love at all."

Like she has sedated him, it is easy for her to slide the pendant back into her hand. The way she caresses it with her thumb, bringing it to her chest, it's as if she can see its glossy curls, or at least see what magic binds it to these twins, and them to each other.

The guardian whispers, "Make me a deal for your sister."

He rests his head against the wall. "What do you want? Have all my daughters. My daughters' daughters. Curse my line. Make the most desperate of them kill baby girls in their cribs. Have it all."

She smiles. "No, no. I don't want to wait that long." The light from the weapon flashes across his face. "I want  _you_."

.

ix

.

_I'm here._

_I'm here._

_I have always wished for you to never doubt that. I wished that before you left, I could have communicated to you that I would one day find you. Even if we were the youngest of children, I remember that moment – our mother always says that my recollection is invented, formulated from dreams and desperations and the tracks of her tears, because no…no, it didn't happen this way._

_I know men took you, a baby screaming in your blankets, away from your family. They shielded your tiny face from the sun so you would not grow up missing it. I understood nothing painful but the commotion, and was soon silenced – I had no idea that in time, I would realise what had just been carved out of my chest, and soon that emptiness would begin to ache. And slowly kill me._

_But I began to repeatedly dream of that moment… I dreamed that you vanished from me in whatever age I was at the time. As a child, you were snatched away on the winds, and as a teenager, you vanished into flame. A young man, I saw a million undead hands dragging you under the earth. Ripping you to pieces, in exactly the way that I felt. It could not have been just mortal men and a scrawled law that took you away from me._

_If mortals stole you, than I could make them taste something close to what I felt._

_Rin._

_I have always heard you. More than anything, I have wished to find you, but what stays at the forefront of my prayers and existence is the wish that you can hear_ _**me** _ _._

_And that you know that I am here._

_And I am searching._

_And will_ _**always** _ _be here._

_That you may wait forever, but there will be an end._

_And I will be there._

_I will be there._

.

x

.

She stands before the door.

A smile graces her face, and his hand still sears with the coldness of her own palm. A deal, charmed with something mocking a healing spell; giving him enough, at least, to get as far as the dragon's lair and summon a voice out of himself. She holds her staff out slightly, ready to call open the door, and his heart is in his throat, thickly, exhaustedly pounding. He is too drained to feel anything but a starved, desperate need to pass the door and see the living apparition.

And replace her.

The guardian lifts her hand, and with a great thundering, the wall begins to fissure with an unmarred arc – the crack spreads from behind her to the black void ceiling of the cavern. Reaching to heaven like lightning. A colourless darkness pours through the opening as it yawns backwards. He keeps his eyes fixed on the guardian.

She orders, "Send her here. I will lead her to the exit."

He nods stiffly.

Her smile ghosts genuine on her marble, hidden face. She gives him a shallow bow. "Hero boy," she praises, "I  _do_  hope you can sing."

He cracks half a smirk at her. She seems so pleased – of course. He can be her toy forever, now. It fills him with the darkest dread that seems to drive him into the earth, glowing hallucinations of the beast's coal-like eyes that he will save his sister from.

She does not step out of his way, so he must go around her. The door is very slow, deliberately orchestrated by her, perhaps, to make the situation all the more climactic and laughable, but it's enough for him to squeeze through if it begins to shut.

He glances at her over his shoulder. She has not turned.

So he forces her to.

With the quickness he'd once trusted to be inherently a part of himself, and a slip of the viciousness, he locks his fingers in her necklace and yanks her down – she stumbles, shocked; he ropes an arm around her face from behind. His fingers close hard in the seam of her mask, and, breathing heavy, pull outwards –

She vaults him hard over her shoulder, but catches him before he hits the stone. With a shriek akin to her laughter, the guardian grips him hard around the throat – he sees only a flash of her face torn in betrayal – and slams him into the door. It feels as if a fracture breaks his skull from nape to forehead, a spiderweb of pain, but he's lost his weakness in the hours; when she swings at his face with her staff, he catches it with a handful of metal and blood, and kicks it hard into her face.

He plummets to the floor.

She screams: not that wild laughter, and not of fury, but horror, ripping out of her like the freeing of her very soul. It is deafening. A storm of glass whipping through the chamber. She collapses at his side, and in her groping, scrabbling hands, there are the shards of bloody marble and painted stone, shuddering in her palms like flower petals.

He grabs her wrist. She seems unable to respond, but he pushes her up to her knees, where the fragments tumble into her skirt, and he can see her face for the first time – she is youthfully, innocently beautiful, her cheeks flooding with a new flush of painful pink, her eyelashes glistening, and her eyes are a striking gold. Flakes of reptilian scales pour like tears from them. The blade, or perhaps the final grip of the mask, has torn a deep crevice into her brow – she blinks naively at the blood stinging her eyes. He pushes her hair back from her shoulder and stumbles to his feet, trying to drag her with him.

"You are free," he says breathlessly, "So I am, too. Our deal is over."

She rises unsteadily. Her weight leans into him, and she's trembling so hard that he isn't sure he can help her. "Go," he says, and gives her a push to the other end of the infinite chamber. "Run –  _run_. We may follow you."

Her grip suddenly tightens in his coat. Her head is bowed. Her blood splatters his shoes, runs rivulets across his arms, burning hot.

She whispers, the snarl roiling out of her from a great distance, "You will never take her from me."

Len hears the beginning pressure of a great sound from beyond the door. Like the approach of a storm. The marvelous shift of air long stagnant being warmed, disturbed.

He shoves her off of him. The presence of the voice seems pushed out of her with a great force: she stumbles, ankles bending weak, and suddenly she is clawing with a deranged lunacy at her own face. Red sprinkles through the air – she is shrieking protests, a swelling "No, no,  _no_ , god  _please_ , leave me alone!  _I don't want to go!_  No, no, no,  _no, no, no,_ _ **PLEASE!"**_

Her screaming shakes up the walls, and breaks whatever solidity he thought was inside of him. She looks like misery. She looks like nothing.

He isn't here for her.

He grabs her staff from the ground and stumbles backwards. The earth is closing in upon them, a slumbering beast awakened and flashing in her dissonant eyes, and Rin – Rin is alone.  _I'm here with her,_  he assures himself.  _I will make it._

_I'm coming to you._

He runs to the door with a slight limp that feels like an anvil around his waist, and over his shoulder takes a breath to holler something at her panic – a prayer, a thanks, a curse? A hope for her to be free?

It dies in his throat.

Her blood rains off his body and he feels no regret, and she vanishes in the blue glow of the cavern.


End file.
